1 year later, the Ice Bucket Challenge monies this breakthrough in ALS research.

Of course you do. It was that viral video campaign that took off last summer where you’d log into Facebook and watch a steady creek of your friends dumping water on themselves in the name of awareness and research for the ALS Association.

Ling wanted to do an “Ask Me Anything” to debunk some of the negative things being said by skeptics about the success of the Ice Bucket Challenge.

“I chiefly wanted to do this[ “Ask Me Anything”] because I recollect reading a lot of narratives about people complaining that the ice bucket challenge was a waste and that scientists weren’t employing the money to do research, etc. I assure you that this is absolutely false, ” Ling writes.

“All of your donations have been amazingly helpful and we have been working tirelessly to find a cure. With the amount of money that the ice bucket challenge created, I feel that there’s a lot of hope and optimism now for real, meaningful therapies.”

So what’s the big breakthrough? Well, it has to do with protein or rather, one specific protein.

Ling breaks down the purpose of TDP-4 3 with an analogy involving a library that’s easy for us non-scientist kinds to understand:

“DNA is located in the nucleus of a cell. You can think of a nucleus as a library except that instead of having books neatly lined up on shelves, the books in a nucleus have all of their pages ripped out and hurl around randomly.

To sort through this mess, the cell has great librarians that go around collecting all these pages, collating them and neatly binding them together as books. These librarians then ship these ‘books’ out of the nucleus so that other workers in the cell can do their jobs. Suppose of these books as instruction manuals.

TDP-4 3 is a very special type of librarian. TDP-4 3’s task is to ensure that nucleus librarians don’t accidentally make a mistake and set a random nonsense page( usually filled with gibberish) into the books that they ship out . If one of these nonsense pages makes it into an ‘instruction manual, ‘ construction workers in the cell get really confused and mess things up . For nomenclature, we call these nonsense pages ‘cryptic exons.'”

His team found that in 97% of ALS lawsuits, TDP-4 3 wasn’t doing its task . And now that they know this, they’ve been able to begin work on new therapies to do TDP-4 3’s task for it. If successful, he believes this can slow down the progression of the disease .

How cool is that?

Baseball Hall-of-Famer Lou Gehrig became the face of ALS after he tearfully retired from baseball upon diagnosis. Photo by Hulton Archive/ Getty Images.

But what about the other 3 %? Well, we don’t have all the answers just yet.

One redditor would like to request that topic, and essentially, it boils down to the fact that ALS is still fairly unpredictable. While TDP-4 3 may play a large its participation in the disease’s progression, it’s not the whole picture. For those individuals for whom ALS operates in the family, that seems to be linked to a gene called SOD1, and not TDP-4 3.

That’s why research needs to continue.

“When you look at ALS from a genetics view, about 10% of the cases are called ‘familial’,[ that is ], lots of people in the family have ALS and it seems to be passed down. The other 90% of ALS appears to occur entirely by unfortunate opportunity and we call that ‘sporadic.’

As researchers, we look to the genetics for clues to study the disease. One of the first family-linked genes discovered was a gene called SOD1 that is found in about 30% of familial lawsuits. But it’s starting to seem like SOD1 is an outlier because TDP-4 3 doesn’t seem to be messed up. Instead, SOD1 seems to clump together due to the mutant. We get the 3% because 30% of 10% familial is 3 %. ” Ling

And from there, who knows? Maybe this is the breakthrough that sets up the next big step in seeing a cure for this absolutely ruthless ailment. 76 years after it first entered the public consciousness with Lou Gehrig’s emotional parting speech, a cure feels closer than ever before.

ALS runs in Carbajal’s family. His grandmother, his mother, and he have all been diagnosed with the ailment. His Ice Bucket Challenge video was powerful because it set a face to the research and the desperation for a cure.

The research built possible by the Ice Bucket Challenge dedicates hope to people like Anthony. It’s just so important.

Telling that 30,000 people live with ALS doesn’t entail a whole lot until you watch the ache it causes those living with it and watching their loved ones do battle. When you watch Anthony’s video, his tears welling up in his eyes, it’s clear just how much the world required something like the Ice Bucket Challenge to fund the research we need to put an end to ALS once and for all.